INDIANAPOLIS—There was not one Louisville player on the ground, there were three. That’s how dreadful it was to see. There was Kevin Ware lying on his back in front of the Cardinals’ bench, his right leg in too many pieces, and nearby teammates Chane Behanan and Wayne Blackshear simply dropped to the floor in the fruitless attempt to imagine away what they’d witnessed.

The basketball court at Lucas Oil Stadium was on a raised platform, with the team benches a few steps below. So for the Louisville players and coaches stationed there, Ware’s injury was directly at eye level. Coach Rick Pitino was just off the court, and he’d seen Ware go down after challenging a shot by Duke’s Tyler Thornton, but thought nothing of it until he tried to help Ware to his feet.

“He was really fine, until the two of us looked at his leg,” Pitino said. “He looked down and I looked down, and obviously we both lost it. And then everybody saw it. And we didn’t get it covered up fast enough because you’re not right at the bench. It was tough to look at. I’ve not seen anything like that.

“I’ve seen guys blow out their ACL, but I’ve never seen an injury like that before.”

The compound fracture of Ware’s right tibia was a shocking moment for all of the Cardinals, most of all Ware. While the others were aching for him, though, literally weeping for him, Ware remembered something that so easily could have been lost on his teammates. They still had a basketball game to play. They had the opportunity to reach the Final Four, a Final Four that will be contested in Atlanta, the city that Ware calls home, where he once was an all-state guard who played in the Georgia 4-A title game.

This was something Ware dearly wanted, and there was only one way left for him to make it happen.

“There are some times in life you really don’t have the words to handle that situation,” Pitino said. “He said to me five times, ‘I’m OK; just win the game.’ I got everybody over after we covered up the injury and said, ‘Listen to him.’ And he said it over 10 times. ‘Just win the game, I’ll be OK.’ It had to come from him, and it did.”

Louisville earned an 85-63 victory Sunday evening in the NCAA Tournament Midwest Region final by crushing Duke in an almost unimaginable fashion over the final 20 minutes. What had been a 35-32 Cards lead at the break was torn open with a 17-2 explosion that lasted seven minutes and reduced the Devils to a mere facsimile of the team that entered the day with 30 victories.

While all this occurred, Ware had been transported to Methodist Hospital and underwent successful surgery to repair the fracture in his leg. The bone was reset, a rod was inserted in the tibia and the wound that developed when the break occurred was closed during a two-hour procedure. While the team returned to Louisville, Pitino was planning to remain in Indianapolis to visit Ware late Sunday and early Monday. Ware is hoping to travel with the team to Atlanta.

Ware’s words lingered with the Cardinals while his surgery was occurring and while they were trying to finish the game.

“When Kevin Ware was over there, laying on the ground hurt, the only thing that was in his mind was to win this game,” freshman forward Montrezl Harrell said. “For him to be laying over there in the predicament that he was, and he’s telling us to win this game, we had to come out here and do it, pull it out some way.”

Harrell said it wasn’t until the Cardinals were finished with the first half, their locker room conversation—Pitino told them, “Guys, if we don’t get him home to Atlanta, it wasn’t worth playing this season.”—and the halftime warmups that he began to concentrate again on playing basketball.

“When I got on the court, I played my position. I did everything I had to do,” Harrell said. “But it took me a while before I could get it out of my head and just finish playing this game.”

Friday night, after Ware had scored a career-best 11 points in helping the Cardinals to win a Sweet 16 game over Oregon, he talked about how he was pursuing his “dream,” to not just finish four years and then get a job playing overseas but to make it in the NBA. It was mentioned to him that after the way he turned off a hard hedge by Oregon forward Arsalan Kazemi and drove down the lane with a pro-level athletic burst that maybe it wasn’t so much a dream.

Seeing him play so brilliantly against Oregon made this circumstance that much harder for his teammates to bear.

“If you saw the injury, it was an unbelievable moment,” forward Luke Hancock said. “Such a good kid, and playing so well right now. No one wants to go out at that stage. So it was a very difficult moment.”

Pitino worried immediately that Ware might have suffered a career-ending injury. Although there is no timetable yet for Ware’s return to competition, Pitino was told by team trainer Fred Hina that it was a “Michael Bush injury,” meaning it was similar to the fracture that knocked out the Cardinals’ star running back in the first game of the 2006 season. Bush turned professional the next spring, was drafted by the Oakland Raiders and sat out his entire rookie year to recover. He has become a productive pro running back who nearly hit the 1,000-yard mark in his fourth NFL season.

“Once I knew that, I could regroup and get them refocused,” Pitino said. “I had to hear that, because I’d never seen anything like that in my life.”